Sony will be launching its new handheld, the PlayStation Vita later this year. From everything we’ve seen, it’s a wonderful (and wonderfully powerful) little device that’ll be bringing a home-console like experience to the palm of your hand. Sony are quite confident of its success, believing the handheld will carry the company until the PlayStation 4 rolls around for Next-Gen. Microsoft isn’t quite so sure of its impending success; Xbox COO Dennis Durkin doubts that the Vita is going to have the impact Sony hopes it will.
"I’m not sure I would want to be launching a dedicated portable device right now into that market," he told Industry Gamers in an interview.
â€I think the DS – if you look at the 3DS, certainly versus people’s expectation’s it’s not been as successful as people would have thought. So that’s a very crowded market and a very, very red ocean right now with a lot of change happening. So I’m not sure it’s [a good idea]," he went continued."You only have a certain number of bets you can make as a company and you have to decide what you want to put your wood behind and I’m just not sure that that’s a place that I would put mine."
The company recently reiterated that it would not be bringing a portable gaming device to the market.
In a way, I think he might be right. People just don’t seem to have the time, money or inclination to get new handhelds at the moment – mostly thanks to the propagation of smartphone gaming; a sentiment echoed by iD’s John Carmack who said , "I wouldn’t want to be the executive making the decision to launch a new portable gaming machine in the post-smartphone world," before saying the PlayStation Vita’s currently impressive spec is "going to look pretty pokey" when smartphones meet and exceed its muscle in a year or two.
There’s also the fact that most of its intended market – core gamers – already have home consoles, and don’t really need to duplicate that experience on the go. What do you think? Is the Vita going to have a hard time like its predecessor (until its fairly recent explosion in Japan, that is) or is Sony’s new handheld set to dominate the portable market?
Source : IndustryGamers
Last Updated: June 27, 2011
